Nokia's Bizarre New Ad Is Freaking People Out

To promote its new Lumia 2520 tablet, Nokia pulled out all stops and went hundreds of shades of, er, creepy.

Its bizarre new commercial revolves around the concept of the mullet hairstyle: business in the front, party in the back. Work and play in a single tablet. Get it? This concept could have worked had the ad's execution not been so weird. It is set to an out-of-place Harry Potter-esque background score with an air of both Sweeney Todd and The Addams Family. The ad has more than a few people scratching their heads:

Why is Nokia promoting its tablet in such a strange way? The company is soon to be subsumed into Microsoft, so it's not clear what benefits it gets from accruing sales of the product en masse—which ad campaigns are, of course, all about. But the ad does establish the Nokia tablet as unusual in a market full of extremely similar, and thus boringly unsurprising devices. Nokia may be attempting to give its brand some identity in an attempt to ensure it sticks in people's minds when Microsoft takes over. This ad certainly has people buzzing, but perhaps for all the wrong reasons.